Friday, June 29, 2018

Journal of English Language Teaching (ELTAI, India 2018. (60, 3, p. 19). (I was invited to comment on the characteristics of a good ESL research paper, word limit = 500 words.)

1.Make the paper too long (Krashen, 2012a). Example: Far too many papers waste space on long and irrelevant literature reviews, designed only to show that the author has done some reading. “When we ask the time, we don't want to know how watches are constructed.”Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799)

2.Fill the paper with unnecessary jargon and jibberish (Krashen, 2012b). Incomprehensible papers are a good way of avoiding criticism:“As long as academics write in the tortured vocabulary of specialization for seminars and conferences, where they are unable to influence public debate, they are free to espouse any bizarre or ‘radical’ theory” (Hedges, 2010: p.125). Such papers do not advance knowledge.

3.Publish in an expensive journal or an even more expensive book. Prices of journals and books are now outrageous, which means research is not available to most people unless they have access to a first-class university library. Universities make it worse by insisting that professors only publish in these expensive journals or collections.

Mathematician Tim Gowers, winner of the Fields Medal (math’s Nobel Prize), has led a boycott of the Elsevier publishing company because of their high prices. His solution is open-access journals published on the internet that do not charge readers and that either don’t charge authors or charge only minimal fees to meet some of the journals’ expenses (e.g. not US $600 but US $10).

Education should be the first field to encourage and accept open access, but instead it seems to be the last. The results of educational research should be made freely available to all teachers, researchers, and interested members of the public.

Note: Many of my papers and books are available for free download at www.sdkrashen.com. I am gradually adding more, and I intend to add this one.

Tuesday, June 19, 2018

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation wants to "diagnose the root cause of poor performance" by investing $68 million to expand education grantmaking abroad ("The Gates Foundation's Education Plans Go International," Curriculum Matters blog, June 3, 2018). But we already know what causes poor performance. Study after study over many decades has concluded that poverty is the culprit.

Until our country's government and citizens take steps to substantially reduce and eventually eliminate poverty by ensuring every person has full employment at a living wage, we can do a lot to protect students from the negative impact of poverty. Many low-income children suffer from food deprivation, lack of medical care, and lack of access to books&—all of which affect their school performance. We can invest more in food programs, medical care and school nurses, and libraries and librarians.

The Gates Foundation seems to have no interest in doing this. Instead, the foundation seems to be concerned about better data analysis and improving teaching and classroom practice. The best teaching in the world will have no effect if students are hungry, ill, or have nothing to read.

Friday, June 8, 2018

“You can help students read: (AARP Bulletin, June 2018; https://states.aarp.org/ca_you-can-help-students-read/) seems to accept the conclusion that if children are not “proficient” readers by the end of grade 3, they are more likely to do poorly in school. (“Students who do not reach reading proficiency by the end of third grade are four times less likely to graduate from high school…”).

There are good reasons for rejecting this pessimistic conclusion: First, there is nothing magic about grade 3. The study that the AARP Bulletin cites only examined the relationship between reading ability in grade 3 and eventual high school graduation. There is every reason to expect that the same relationship would hold for reading ability at every other grade.

But more important, there is no reason to expect that poor reading ability at any age inevitably leads to poor reading forever and school failure. A great deal of research confirms that students can improve in reading at any age, given the right conditions: Access to interesting reading material and a time and place to read them. Programs such as AARP Experience Corps can be a big help: When children are read and hear stories, they acquire the language they need to understand written texts and develop an interest in reading on their own.

Tuesday, June 5, 2018

The Gates Foundation wants to “diagnose the root cause of poor performance.” (“The Gates Foundation's Education Plans Go International,”June 3, 2018).
We already know what it is. Study after study done over many decades has concluded that the root cause is poverty.

There are two things that can be done. First, reduce and eventually eliminate poverty by working towards full employment at a living wage. Gates et al have made things worse by selling schools expensive and untested technology, such as computers used for the unnecessary testing required by the common core. Second, until we eliminate poverty, we can do a lot to protect students from the negative impact of poverty. Children of poverty suffer from food deprivation, lack of medical care and lack of access to books, each of which effects school performance. We can invest more in food programs, improved medical care (eg school nurses), and libraries and librarians.

We don’t have to worry about “improving teaching and classroom practice.” The best teaching in the world will have no effect if students are hungry, ill, and have nothing to read.

Stephen Krashen

Original article

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has announced a $68 million commitment to expand its education grantmaking abroad.

The foundation is well known for its global development work, particularly its efforts to combat malaria and infectious disease. But its education grantmkaking has been mostly focused on the United States—where it has not always been well received.

Girindre Beeharry, the foundation's director of global education learning strategy, announced the strategy in a post on the foundation's website. In the post, Beeharry writes that, while 90 percent of primary-age students around the world today attend school, including many more girls than ever, quality remains an ongoing challenge.

To find out how the foundation could help, he and others from the foundation spoke to teachers, academics, government officials, and parents in several countries, including Ethiopia, India, Kenya, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Uganda.

Beeharry hints that the decision to embark on this listening tour came at least partly from lessons learned from the foundation's K-12 work in the United States.

"We have learned that improving education is incredibly difficult and complex," he writes. "We also know that schools in the United States and ones in low- and lower-middle-income countries face fundamentally different challenges that require unique solutions. We set out to learn more, and to determine how we could make a meaningful difference globally."

The funding announcement doesn't specify exactly what kinds of grants the foundation will make—but does say that it wants to "deepen the evidence and develop tools and approaches, with an emphasis on foundational learning —such as reading and mathematics in primary grades."

Monday, June 4, 2018

“Carpentersville’s English-language law was supposed to unify, but critics say it did the opposite. Now it’s been repealed” (June 4) accurately cites research showing that immigrants are motivated to acquire English and most do so successfully.

Research also documents a number of benefits of bilingualism. In brief, students in schools that use well-designed bilingual programs acquire more quickly English than students in schools that use English-only “immersion” programs: Immersion programs supply more English, but bilingual education provides more comprehensible English, which is what fuels language acquisition.

In addition, studies show that bilingualism is good for the brain: those who regularly use two languages suffer less from dementia. Bilingualism also provides economic advantages: if you want to sell your product, it helps if you speak your customers’ language.

Sunday, June 3, 2018

Re: China’s schools are quietly using AI to mark studentsʼ essays ... but do the robots make the grade? May 29, 2018

If the purpose of testing student writing is to “make recommended improvements in areas such as writing style, structure…”, that is, to improve instruction, it makes no sense to use artificial Intelligence to test writing. In fact, it makes no sense to test writing at all. Writing proficiency consists of (1) mastery of the special language of writing, which includes accuracy in the conventions of writing (e.g. spelling, punctuation, grammar) and appropriate writing style. Only a tiny fraction of this can be taught. A substantial amount of research shows that mastery of the language of writing is absorbed, or “acquired,” through reading, not from instruction.

A second aspect of writing proficiency consists of knowing how to use writing to solve problems. When we write down our thoughts, we clarify and stimulate our thinking. The act of writing, in other words, doesn’t help us master the special language of writing – this comes from reading – but actual writing can help us solve problems and make us smarter. As writing expert Peter Elbow has noted, it is difficult to hold more than one thought in mind at a time. When we write our ideas down, and reread what we have written, it is easier to see the relationship between our ideas, improve our thinking, and come up with better ideas. Teachers can tell students how to do this: the strategies that make up the “composing process” are simple to describe (e.g. reread and revise, delay editing until you are satisfied with your message), but it is impossible to test to see whether writers actually use these strategies.

We can save a great deal of time and money, and also help young writers acquire the written language by not testing writing, and by investing the money in libraries. We can help young writers develop strategies for using writing to solve problems by engaging them in writing about problems that truly interest them.